Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging is widely used in interventional cardiology as a diagnostic tool for a diseased vessel, such as an artery, within the human body to determine the need for treatment, to guide the intervention, and/or to assess its effectiveness. IVUS imaging uses ultrasound echoes to create an image of the vessel of interest. The ultrasound waves pass easily through most tissues and blood, but they are partially reflected from discontinuities arising from tissue structures (such as the various layers of the vessel wall), red blood cells, and other features of interest. The IVUS imaging system, which is connected to the IVUS solid state catheter by way of a patient interface module (PIM), processes the received ultrasound echoes to produce a cross-sectional image of the vessel where the solid state catheter is placed.
Existing solid state IVUS catheters deliver useful diagnostic information at the cost of high system complexity, including a broad bandwidth requirement for data acquisition, high memory storage for buffering large amounts of data, and heavy computational requirements. Thus, there is a need for enhanced image quality to provide more valuable insight into the vessel condition, using a simplified system.
Accordingly, there remains a need for improved devices, systems, and methods for providing a compact and efficient circuit architecture and electrical interface to a solid state IVUS catheter used in an intravascular ultrasound system.